A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

by Emma Southon

From this point on, violence was always a possibility in Roman politics. It took a generation for murder to really take off as a strategic approach to political problems, but the elephant very firmly moved into the room as Tiberius’ blood splattered onto the statue of Romulus.

After being badgered with irritating lawsuits designed to annoy and exhaust him – because litigation really was a way of life for the Romans – Gaius eventually cracked and announced his candidacy to be Tribune in 123 BCE.

This time, proving his combative nature, it was Gaius’ fault. After his supporters stabbed a rude lictor to death with their pens (!) and Gaius’ main complaint was that it looked bad for him, it became clear that violence was now part of the Roman agenda.

When the Senate found Gaius’ body, they cut off his head and a man named Septimuleius (say that three times fast) impaled it on a spear and carried it back to Rome. He was rewarded with the head’s weight in gold. To be fair to the Senate, Gaius did rather ask for it by trying to mess with the Senate with a rag-tag army of pals and knives, but it was another violent blow to the Republic and another blood-soaked disaster that put an end to the idea of democratically reforming the government of the Roman Empire pretty much forever.

The best example of how mundane political murder became in the late Republic is the somewhat pathetic street murder of Publius Clodius Pulcher by his political rival Titus Annius Milo.

He was the youngest of six in his generation, so he had youngest child syndrome and a real need for attention. This compulsion regularly manifested itself in causing immense amounts of trouble and pissing off Cicero.

Once upon a time, Clodius had cared about Cicero and they had been enthusiastic allies in the extrajudicial murder of Lucius Sergius Catilina, better known now as Catiline.

By the 60s BCE, Roman government had effectively broken down. Pompey, Caesar and Crassus were coming up to full war, while every aspect of government was poisoned with bribery, violence and uncertainty.

Catiline was a low-level rapscallion who wanted to make a name for himself by somehow violently overthrowing the consulship and perpetrating a lot of murders in the name of the disenfranchised people of Rome. Unfortunately for him, Cicero was the consul and Cicero was no Mucius Scaevola. As soon as Cicer...

Clodius got hornily curious about the ladies-only religious ceremony for the Bona Dea festival. Bona Dea was a specifically Italian goddess whose festival was held at night, in secret, in the house of the Pontifex Maximus. His wife led the ceremony, accompanied by the Vestal Virgins. It was a big thing that men weren’t allowed to participate, so obviously Clodius wanted in. Being precisely thirty years old and an idiot, he thought he might look young and feminine enough to pass so he disguised himself as a woman – presumably by putting on women’s clothes and some make-up – and climbed in through the Pontifex Maximus’ window.

Clodius was immensely popular and cultivated a gang of supporters who liked to beat the living daylights out of people who looked at him funny. He was also enormously rich, so he was able to use that classic combination of bribery and intimidation to get himself acquitted. And that was the end of ‘Cicero and Clodius: Best Friends Forever’.

Clodius, who was technically called Publius Claudius Pulcher, then got himself adopted by a plebeian family in 59 BCE, meaning that he was no longer part of the patrician Claudian family, and changed his name to Clodius so he could run for election as Tribune of the Plebs. As a move, this was unprecedented and truly audacious.

Until this moment, the point of gaining prestige and power and winning elections and victories for Roman men was to honour the family name. Every elite Roman man wanted to live up to his grandfather’s greatness or create a greatness to bequeath to his grandchildren. The family was supposed to be honoured by personal glory. But Clodius gave up his family and voluntarily surrendered his family name in order to be able to take an office to which he had no right, to be able to court the favour of the people of Rome and increase his personal prestige.

As Tribune, Clodius proceeded to annoy the Senate, provide a perpetual corn dole to everyone in Rome, and, specifically to ruin Cicero’s life, he passed a law to prosecute consuls who had executed citizens without trial. And got Cicero exiled. Then burnt Cicero’s house down.

in 58 BCE, he created an armed gang of free and enslaved men to protect his interests. This is where things started to go really bananas because once Clodius effectively had a personal paramilitary force ready to beat the life out of his opponents, everyone wanted one.

Hitler parallel.

Titus Annius Milo got himself a gang of enslaved men and gladiators and, before long, political meetings became brawls. Every election was now a battleground. Rome was in chaos. For years. By 52 BCE, gang violence had become as normal a part of political life as bribery and prosecuting one another for gang violence.

In Cassius Dio’s words, murder had become an everyday occurrence and by this he means open murders in the street. It was impossible to hold elections without them turning into bloodbaths so no one was holding elections.

Where Mark Antony chasing Clodius around the Forum with a sword, screaming bloody murder and forcing Clodius to lock himself inside a bookshop, was not the world-shaking drama it should have been – because an ex-consul chasing a Tribune around with a sword is wild – but a minor footnote of an anecdote.

the Roman sources are always keen to dehumanise these people, who were the urban middle and working classes.

These are the people who were being beaten up if they voted the wrong way in the elections, and whose homes and businesses were damaged every time a street fight broke out between two political gangs, and who were more and more alienated from the running of the Empire. And Clodius, odious though he was, was the only person offering them anything.

In effect, Clodius gave every citizen in Rome a universal basic meal plan, and for that reason they’d love him forever. So when he was murdered, it was a problem.

Clodius and Milo, being senators, did not engage in violence themselves. They hired and bought men to do it for them. They were generals, not soldiers, and so they did not expect to be the ones injured in street brawls. So on this day, when one of Milo’s men drove a knife into Clodius’ back, it was a surprise to everyone.

Mark Antony, according to Cicero, went around telling everyone that Cicero had asked Milo to kill Clodius, which is a version I like a lot.7 Cicero did occasionally write letters dated ‘x days from the battle of Bovillae’, which suggests that he held the date of Clodius’ death close to his heart.

Asconius, who wrote commentaries on Cicero’s published speeches as absolutely rubbish but quite sweet presents for his sons during the reign of Nero (oh thanks, Dad, you wrote me a school book. Thanks.), gave the most detailed account. He portrays Milo as a killer without remorse. In his telling, the gladiator Birra attacked Clodius for giving him a threatening look, and Clodius’ entourage then dragged the wounded man to a nearby wine shop. There he lay, bleeding but alive while the brawl (though the Romans do insist on calling it a battle) between sixty enslaved men raged outside. Milo, when he heard that Clodius was injured, sent his men to find him and finish him.

They then finished killing the rest of his enslaved entourage and left the Tribune and his men in piles on the side of the Appian Way. Another senator, Sextus Teidius, travelling along the side of the road later in the day, came across the carnage and brought Clodius’ corpse back to Rome.8

Whatever the truth, Clodius ended up dead on the side of the Appian Way with a knife in his back and the people of Rome were appalled. This was a step too far. Clodius’ entourage carried his body to the Forum where they laid it on the rostra. He suddenly became a martyr for the Republic. He may have been an incestuous, sacrilegious, violent, horrible patrician co-opting the power of the plebeian Tribune, but he was their incestuous, sacrilegious, violent, horrible patrician co-opting their plebeian power and they were absolutely not OK with other senators killing him.

He was their hero and they mourned him and they built him a pyre right there in the Forum. They built him a pyre of benches and wood ripped from the Senate House and then, at the appropriate hour, they burnt his body and the Senate House with it and held the funeral feast in the shadow of its flames.

Pompey’s intimate involvement with the case meant that the outcome of the trial was decided long before anyone stood up to speak at it and everyone knew it: Milo was going down.

Cicero did his best. He powered through a truncated speech which was practically an epigram in comparison to, for example, his all-day thirty-six-thousand-word epic speech for Cluentius. He also, amusingly, didn’t even try to convince the court that Milo was innocent. He simply tried to argue that he shouldn’t be punished for murdering Clodius.

In the grand sweep of history, Clodius’ murder seems like a footnote. It’s not got the cultural cachet of Caesar crossing the Rubicon or the formation of the first Triumvirate, and Clodius, as even his own modern biographers argue, left no stamp on Roman history except as a rake and a power-hungry dandy.9 But Clodius was another in a long line of magistrates who were on the side of the people of Rome, who were loved by the people of Rome, who tried to address their needs and alleviate their poverty, and who was murdered by men who hated him for it.

In life, Clodius was an abhorrent jerk who thought of nothing but himself and would probably try to put his hand up your skirt. But in death, he was another popular martyr to the cause of Roman democracy.

So this is the context of Julius Caesar’s murder: a solid century of judicial and extrajudicial murders of senators by senators; decades of senators defining themselves as representatives of the Roman state and using their own hands to kill to save their status quo.

And so the senators lauded themselves as saviours of the Republic and as heroes of Rome. Fine, upstanding men willing to kill in the name of the fatherland.

The traditional story of Romulus’ death was that he was suddenly assumed into heaven in a highly localised and very dense thundercloud while parading the troops outside the walls of Rome, to the surprise of everyone. However, there was a second story which we see in Livy’s History of Rome and in Appian’s Civil Wars. That version says that Romulus began acting as a tyrant towards the end of his reign, and that the cloud which surrounded him that day on the parade ground was not a divine thundercloud but a cloud of dust raised by senators falling on him with knives.

we have only five sources for his death, none of them contemporary. An immense amount of information about Caesar’s career and rule as dictator of Rome comes from Cicero’s speeches and letters, of which he wrote a great many. Pick up any history of the late Republic or biography of Mark Antony or Caesar and look at how much of it relies almost entirely on Cicero’s words.

He is a historian’s wet dream, or he would be if he wasn’t so deeply unreliable, but he never wrote about Caesar’s death.

Anyway, we are left with five sources from the Imperial period: a fragment of a biography of Augustus by a Syrian philosopher, Nicolaus of Damascus, written between twenty and thirty years after the death of Caesar; a biography of Julius Caesar written by a member of the equestrian class called Suetonius from the emperor Hadrian’s household in around 100 CE, 150 years after the murder; another biography of Julius Caesar by the Greek philosopher and moralist Plutarch written at about the same time; a history of the civil wars of the late Republic by Appian, a historian from Alexandria in Egypt, from approximately 180 years after the events it described; and, finally, a history of Rome from the beginning by the Greek-speaking Roman senator Cassius Dio, written in around 230 CE, almost three centuries later.

Much as we like to call everything between 753 BCE and 476 CE (when the last emperor of the West was deposed) ‘Roman’, we sometimes have to confront the fact that things changed over those twelve hundred years and this is one of those times.

Apart from Nicolaus, every single one of these was born into a world in which emperors were the norm, where Julius Caesar was a literal god to whom they sacrificed little (and big) animals, who had priests and whose name – Caesar – had become a simple noun to denote imperial power and semi-divine authority. They existed in a world where killing a Caesar was a pretty big fuck...

It’s also important to note that almost all the Greek-language sources (with the exception of Dio who likes to remind everyone that he was a Roman senator about once every three lines) refer to the Romans as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. They are clear that the Romans, or at least the Romans of the past, are other and deeply weird in a lot of ways.

The first source, by Nicolaus, is perhaps the most interesting, as the account of the murder is contained within a deeply sycophantic biography of Augustus which appears to have been written specifically to make Augustus smile.

This was the lived experience context in which he wrote his account of Augustus’ newly deified adopted dad’s death. The death, let’s not forget, which had launched Augustus’ career when Augustus decided that it was a murder that needed to be avenged via the medium of civil war.

This leads to some truly excellent lies and misrepresentations from Nicolaus, including calling Julius Caesar, one of the most successful, and most corrupt, politicians in Western history, ‘unskilled in political practices by reason of his foreign campaigns’, and ‘easily taken in’, which is laugh-out-loud hilarious.

He was also an extremely hard-working bureaucrat with an eye for detail and the ability to juggle a lot of projects at once, which is just as frightening as his military prowess because it meant there was nothing he wasn’t trying to be involved with.

The optimates hated and feared his relentless desire for change and glory, and were terrified of his disregard for things like convention, propriety and the law. Because Caesar was astoundingly corrupt. He bribed his way into his first official job and didn’t stop from that point on.

Always remember that he took his troops across the Rubicon not to save Rome, but because he had refused to give up his job as governor of Gaul as it protected him from being prosecuted in Rome for crimes he had committed.

Imagine if your least favourite world leader just refused to stop being in charge when their term ended because they just didn’t want to and that they also had an enormous personal army.

Ugh

He was so far above every other member of the aristocracy in every visible and invisible way that the optimates found it terrifying. He was ruining everything.

When they finished reciting the list of presents they were giving him, he was unimpressed. He replied that he didn’t want some of them, but he’d take the rest and then he dismissed them to get back to work. He humiliated the Senate. And they were not men who liked being humiliated.

They were supposed to be treated with fawning respect by everyone, including each other. (I really recommend reading some of the surviving letters between Roman senators because they spend half of each letter talking about how brilliant the other guy is and it’s revolting.)